


LEVER/

by shamusandstone (theleaveswant)



Category: Leverage
Genre: Community: apocalyptothon, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-29
Updated: 2009-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/shamusandstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parker together-alone with other survivors in the grim wake of necrophagic plague, burgling the night away for survival and fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	LEVER/

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Apocalypsos](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Apocalypsos).



Parker would like to think that if Nate could have seen her now, leaning out an eleventh-story window to clip the loot bag onto her cable, he'd approve. After all, she was still adhering to the Leverage Consulting and Associates business model in spirit if not in letter. She still took from those who had and gave to those who needed, to the victims of their dark and antisocial deeds. The only difference was that now those who had were mostly dead or evacuated and the needy victims were everyone else.

It should have been dawn when she slung the knapsack of stolen goodies over her shoulder, but the night was cloudy; only an incremental lightening in the hazy purple sky suggested that day might have come. It started to drizzle as she set off down the alley, turned to rain as she wound her way through the abandoned streets. She pulled her hood up over her hair, shivered as her sweater soaked through, but she stuck to the middle of the street rather than seek cover against the buildings and risk being grabbed and hauled into some dark doorway or window by a survivor gone mad with terror and feral with hunger, or worse, one of the last resilient Infected.

She waited until she reached the front door of the fortified police station she now called home, lining her self to dash in to the door, before yelling out the password—one didn't want to wake the neighbors when one didn't know their diet. Safely inside, she tapped the steel door for luck, and started dumping out the contents of her goody bag onto the one section of check-in counter left intact after the last round of materials salvaging. Dan, the early-watch man who'd let her in, caught the cans that rolled off the edge. Enough water had found its way into the bag that some of the labels had stuck and peeled off and the cardboard boxes gone soggy, but the station's residents were long past worrying about anonymous soups. She left Dan and Jill, his shift partner, to sort through the night's haul while she slouched off to her cell.

Parker was the only person holed up in the station with a cell to herself, not because she actively insisted on it but because everyone who had tried sharing with her had given up, discomfited by her odd hours, her apparently unprovoked bouts of laughter, and her habit of staring expressionlessly for minutes at a stretch at them or at nothing visible. Parker recognized that this was not helping her reputation as a potential liability to the crude survivors' colony, but so far her success at procuring food had counter-balanced her idiosyncrasies.

With sheets hung across the three barred walls for privacy, Parker stripped off her wet sweatshirt. She paused while removing her pants to retrieve the wads of folded bills tucked inside the waistband, the other, secret share of her retrieval activities. She kept the cash hidden inside a broken brick in the cell's outer wall, behind the salvaged calendar on which she marked off the days since the beginning of the outbreak and since she had last seen her friends.

Money was essentially worthless at this point; you couldn't eat it or defend yourself with it, and no one had such a surplus of food or weapons that they were willing to trade it for bits of shiny metal or coloured paper—no one smart, anyway: a known horde was a tempting target for a raid. Of course this didn't stop people from caching what money they could find in preparation for a day when it would again have value, but that wasn't why Parker collected it. The comfort she found in adding to her hidden treasure trove had less to do with the possibility of future spending than with simple sensual gratification: the smell of it, the weight of coins in her palm, the greasy roughness of use-worn bills between her fingers. Eliot called her creepy for that, but he liked punching people and chopping up raw meat, so he had no grounds for complaint. Ditto Hardison and his giddiness over chrome-encrusted artifacts named in esoteric poetry of numbers and letters.

Bundled up now in dry clothes and a blanket, wet things pinned to a clothesline running diagonally across the cell, Parker crossed today off on the calendar, pressing hard with the sharpie to squeeze the dredges of ink from its fat felt tip. She hiked the blanket higher up around her shoulders and wistfully flipped back through the calendar, seven months, to when this whole mess began.  
*  
July 19th, 2009, a Sunday. A barbecue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Hardison instigated, Sophie decorated, Eliot took charge of the grill, and Nate drank tonic and lime and looked bemused. Parker sat on a tree branch and beamed, thinking that this was probably the closest she'd come to feeling really content in as long as she could remember. Small wonder then, that that was when it all turned to shit.

The first cases started showing up on the national news feeds before the party had completely wound down, but were not noticed by the attendees until the following morning. They cracked jokes as they cleaned up the compostable paper plates. After all, it was funny—a different kind of flesh-eating virus, straight out of a Romero film. It was less funny at dinner time, when the death toll started to spike, not just from casualties of the infection and their victims but from the shoot-first reactions of a panicked public. Seventy-two hours of increasing trepidation, watching cities empty as fear took hold, trying to determine whether there was anything they could do to help, the situation sailed out of funny, past terrifying, and straight into uncanny. By the time Nate came in to the office clutching his bleeding arm, it was already a waking nightmare.

He kept on Nate-ing right into the organic dementia phase, long enough to get the rest of them to the airport and ready to board an evacuation flight, and then said his goodbyes and kissed Sophie on the forehead. Parker couldn't look while Eliot broke his neck, buried her face in Hardison's shoulder while he buried his in her hair, but when she opened her eyes Sophie was pallid and too-composed and Eliot was wiping tears from his cheeks with one calloused thumb.

That cast rather a pall over their pending escape, and none of them were especially surprised when the plane's flight controls locked down. Someone had to make it through the airport, breached and filling steadily with Infected, to the control tower to release them for take-off. Parker didn't even hesitate.

The last Parker saw of Sophie, she was working her charm keeping the other evacuees calm as they boarded the plane. The last she saw of Eliot, he was holding back a dozen Infected with a banjo and a crochet hook to buy her time. The last she heard of Hardison's voice, he was assuring her that the others were safely on board and pleading with the pilot to circle around to pick her up. The last words they traded, before she pulled out her ear-piece, still echoed clear as life.

"Go. I'll be okay."

"No way."

"You heard the pilot. There's no place to land."

"Parker . . ."

"Don't forget about me, okay?"

"Impossible."

"You know I love you. All of you. You're the only real family I ever knew."

"We'll come back. We'll look for you."

"I'll look for you too. Now get out of here."  
*  
Parker peeked out from behind the sheet covering her cell door towards the mesh-strengthened window at the end of the hall. The rain had stopped and the sky was getting bright. With luck, the last clouds would blow away and the sun would dry the station's concrete roof, and Parker could gather paint and brush and get back to her other project. She'd made it to the right-slanting diagonal of the A last time, ought to be able to finish that letter by nightfall at the very least. First though, might as well catch a nap. Curled up in a nest of mismatched pillows, one hand cradling her cheek and the other clutching the ear-piece she always carried, Parker dreamed in aerial views, the dinosaur's purr of a helicopter in flight. Grey buildings, black asphalt, yellow paint.

LEVER/

**Author's Note:**

> For Apocalypsos. Warnings for angsty dystopian setting, zombie-related violence, character death. General first season spoilers, possibly through 2x01.


End file.
